WoW huntering. Rift nerfs; pets; minmaxing.

Huntering and still enjoying it a lot. My search for Loque and Aotona is ongoing [I have decided the latter is the perfect soloing pet].

I’ve spoken about this before, but what I often find I enjoy in WoW is getting lost in the immense amount of stuff there is to do and collecting pets is just one more thing to do. And it’s a big one too. Seems a bit unfair that we have what amounts to a fair chunk of gameplay only relevant to that one class. None of the other classes get anything like this huge alternative-progression aspect that Hunters do.

I’ve played a bit more Rift, enjoying my Warrior Riftblade>Reaver>Beastmaster build. Big patch has brought some minor nerfs: Flame Spear is still more powerful than any of your melee abilities but is no longer spammable. Fiery Burst is still off the GCD [effectively 33% haste as it takes your rotation from 4 GCDs to 3] …and has still yet to be nerfed.

Something that kind of bugs me in Rift is how prevalent pets are. Even when you’re not speccing yourself primarily or even secondarily into a pet soul, I don’t think I’ve seen a single case outside of healing/tanking builds where it is not a completely obvious choice to just chuck a pet class into your third soul for free damage without having to spend a single GCD, as well as add-management while soloing. And so every single player in the game has a pet running next to them because there’s no benefit in not having one.

Dear Trion, I want a damage meter.

Seriously.

It has nothing to do with epeen, it’s part of the way I enjoy the game. I find way too much fun in min-maxing and theorycrafting and not being able to verify my conclusions past “it feels like the mob is dying faster” is a bit frustrating.

I’m right now looking at the Soul tree calculator trying to decide whether I could get more DPS by changing my subspec from Reaver to Champion, but without being able to see how much damage my Reaver DoTs or Fiery Burst abilities are doing individually, I have no data with which to calculate this.